The Geometry of Leaving

The papaya sat rotting on the counter, its skin turning from green to an angry mottled yellow, much like how the past six months had felt—suspended in some awkward phase of decay that neither of us had the courage to address. Marcus had bought it on a whim, declaring it would be 'our thing,' whatever that meant. Now it sat there, accusing me.

I'd spent the morning watching YouTube videos about pyramid schemes, mesmerized by the geometric certainty of them all—how people willingly climbed toward nothing, convinced they'd reach some golden apex. It wasn't so different from architecture school, honestly. We'd all climbed toward partnership, toward recognition, toward that corner office with the palm-framed view of downtown.

Buster, Marcus's retriever, nudged my thigh with that damp, insistent snout of his. He'd been mine in the divorce, or maybe Marcus had been mine. The paperwork had blurred somewhere between who got the dog and who got the debt.

'Come on,' I told the dog, grabbing the leash from where it still hung on the hook Marcus had installed crookedly three years ago.

We drove to the lake where we'd spread his father's ashes last spring, where the pyramid of his grief had finally collapsed into something manageable. The water looked mercury-flat under the October sky. I waded in fully clothed, the shock of it stealing my breath, and began swimming toward the distant buoy that marked the swimming area's edge. Buster barked from the shore, confused and abandoned.

The water was colder than memory. Somewhere around the middle, I understood something about pyramids—how they were just mountains turned inside out, all surface and no interior. How they were tombs, really, not monuments at all.

I swam back, shivering, to where Buster waited, and we both walked home to the apartment that was now just mine. The papaya was still on the counter. I threw it in the trash. Something about that felt like the first honest thing I'd done in months.